Dear AOL user,
The very existence of civic and political organizing on the Internet is under attack by America Online, and we need to fight back quickly.
AOL just announced plans to charge groups with large memberships for every email sent— to "guarantee" it gets delivered. If this charge was there when MoveOn began, we never would have gotten off the ground. Online organizing all across the political spectrum will suffer greatly—and many issue groups, charities, and other non-profits with large email lists will see a diminished ability to communicate online .
Can you sign this emergency petition to America Online and forward it to your AOL friends?
www.moveon.org
Petition: "AOL, don't charge non-profit civic and political organizing groups to guarantee their emails get delivered to members. Email is a vital tool for regular people to have a voice in our communities and our democracy."
AOL is not used to massive citizen outrage. When thousands of AOL users sign a petition, AOL will begin to understand that they face a huge customer rebellion. Everyone who signs this petition will be sent information on how to contact AOL directly, as well as future steps that can be taken until AOL drops its new policy.
AOL basically wants to blackmail organizations with large membership lists. The only way for groups to be sure members receive their emails would be to pay what the New York Times calls the "electronic equivalent of a postage stamp" for each email address every time a message is sent. If they don't pay, your emails could go into a black hole—or be "stripped of images and Web links."1
AOL pretends that nothing would change for non-paying senders. But, as detailed at the bottom of this email, there is a real threat that AOL would eliminate the protection for non-profit membership groups that currently keeps their emails from being sent into a spam filter and going undelivered.
This new system would also give AOL two paydays: one when you pay for your account, then another when you're emailed by organizations you signed up with. There are also two big losers:
- Loser #1: Customers. "AOL users will become dissatisfied when they don't receive the e-mail that they want, and when they complain to the senders, they'll be told, 'it's AOL's fault,' " said Richi Jennings, an analyst at a research firm which specializes in email.1
- Loser #2: Democracy on the Internet. Gone will be the days when non-profit civic and political organizing can thrive online. These groups' activities would essentially be censored off the Internet—their e-mails going undelivered.
If AOL succeeds, other companies will follow—collecting fees for what used to be free, and ending the ability of people to organize in their community and their democracy. We need to fight back today.
Can you sign this emergency petition to America Online and forward it to your AOL friends?
Petition: "AOL, don't charge non-profit civic and political organizing groups to guarantee their emails get delivered to members. Email is a vital tool for regular people to have a voice in our communities and our democracy."
Thanks for all you do.
–Eli Pariser, Noah T. Winer, Adam Green, and the MoveOn.org Civic Action team
Tuesday, February 7th, 2006
P.S. Here are some basic facts you should know about this issue:
- Right now, email services like AOL and Yahoo put membership groups on something called a "whitelist" (the opposite of a "blacklist"), so they can email their members without getting caught in a spam filter.
- AOL and Yahoo threaten a devastating one-two punch to membership groups.
1) Eliminate the whitelist, or make it significantly harder for membership groups to qualify for it—causing many membership group emails to be labeled "spam" and never get delivered.
2) Offer new "certified" mail that bypasses spam filters and "guarantees" delivery. The New York Times calls it "a controversial system" that requires "1/4 of a cent to a penny" for every message sent to every email address—equaling thousands of dollars per email sent to large membership lists. This threatens the very existence of online organizing.
- AOL and Yahoo claim they will still accept email from senders who have not paid. But that only works if they promise not to eliminate the "whitelist" (or effectively eliminate it by altering the criteria so many membership groups won't qualify). They have made no such promise.
- AOL has openly flirted with eliminating the "whitelist" in the past. If AOL and Yahoo kick membership groups off the whitelist, promises to "still accept" non-paid emails have no meaning—"accepting" means they are thrown in the spam filter and not delivered.
- The vendor AOL and Yahoo hired to run this "certified" service knows that this will harm non-profit membership groups. Their website states, "We have crafted a special program to allow highly-qualified non-profits" to get "full benefits of the CertifiedEmail service at no cost for the duration of 2006." It does not say what "high-qualified" means, and after 2006 all non-profits are out of luck. If the whitelist is gone, their e-mails go to spam filters and go undelivered.
- AOL and Yahoo may have lost their understanding of what makes the Internet work so well for regular people. In the New York Times, AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said, "The last time I checked, the postal service has a very similar system to provide different options." AOL may have forgotten that one of email's main attributes is that it broke down the financial barriers posed by snail mail— barriers that stood in the way of regular people partaking in civic and political organizing on issues they cared about.
Sources:
1. "Postage is due for companies sending e-mail," New York Times, February 4, 2006
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1453
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